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Monday’s moon shone full and bright over the mountain, illuminating diffuse and unusual white wisps in the sky above. Shari Feinstrom, town ombudsperson, headed out for City Hall, determined to wrangle the town council (five individuals with the acumen and decorum of half-drugged feral cats) into finally prioritizing Volcanoville’s critical action items, including the $3.7M operating deficit. Her heart sank as she approached the entrance. Councilmembers Vondela Crassus and Corky Dupree stood there with at least thirty congregants from VV Baptist, waiting to ambush her about taking down the rainbow flag that marked the start of Pride week. They’d been through this a million times, and the other three council members insisted it fly. There would be blood tonight. Shari drove home later, dejected, for among the issues tabled till the following month were the deficit, the looming garbage strike, cuts to the library budget, and the mysterious steam rising from the sidewalk in front of Pipe Down! (the local tobacconist’s on Ash Street). Tuesday morning, Mindy Zamora, just sweet sixteen, was with her grandmother, heading to the clinic for an abortion. There had been some question of being able to afford it, but at the last minute, right after the government shutdown ended, her off-again boyfriend, Army Specialist Manny Diaz (stationed overseas to intervene in the latest sectarian skirmish), had received his salary, and been able to wire her grandmother the money, getting around Mindy’s evangelical parents. Grandma Rita insisted on driving, and in the course of entering the parking lot, managed to graze a shrieking protester with the front bumper (or had they intentionally run out in front of her?). There resulted in a battle between protesters and counter-protesters as to who had been responsible, causing Mindy to break down and miss her appointment altogether. As the crowd lunged upon each other, nobody noticed the series of small tremors rolling under their busy feet. Down the road at VVU, Professor Ted Tiddlebury was in trouble. He’d risen in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, and gone to his office in the Sociology department to read, for the nineteenth time, threatening emails from sophomore hacker Brendan Bean, who’d somehow retrieved a decade-old, deleted, private Facebook post (in which Tiddlebury had praised the behinds of several coeds), and who was demanding $100,000 in untraceable cryptocurrency to keep it quiet. Together with his recent X (formerly Twitter) post expressing relief at the lifting of the mask mandate: Now I can see your beautiful mouths! (have you ever?), Tiddlebury sensed the ice was thin beneath him. Careers had ended for less. And as he entered the shady website, typing, with shaky hands, the account number provided by his blackmailer, he entirely missed the muffled blasts splitting the mountain air some miles away. Early Friday morning in the faculty lounge at VV Middle School, they were processing a micro-aggression. Mr. McDougall, music and band, had been called a leprechaun by Coach Johnson, and was outraged. First, he was a Scot who had jack-all to do with leprechauns. And second, he was sick of being put down for his height! The powerfully built Johnson countered that no Scotsman could be subject to a micro-aggression because they had never suffered, setting McDougall off on a rant involving British Parliament, William Wallace and Rob Roy. When are we getting the other non-binary staff bathroom?! someone cried, and soon the lounge roiled with the question of who was properly oppressed, with much talk of triggering, and ensuring safe spaces, generally. Kay Stanchion, seventh grade science, was the first to turn away from the melee, desperate for the Advil in her purse. In so doing, she looked out the window and saw dark smoke pouring from the top of the mountain. Without saying a word to the others, she swallowed her pills and stole outside, joining Albert Bellagamba, head custodian of thirty-six years, who was smoking and staring at the flames. She accepted a cigarette from him and they stood companionably, puffing away. I think it’s going pyroclastic, he said. (Thinking back to her November unit on volcanism, Kay could only agree.) Within moments, the fiery flow confirmed this fear. Why does everyone have to be so stupid? was among her final thoughts. And just as the varied and aggrieved voices of Volcanoville went silent for good, there was a searing cry of pity (or was it triumph?) from some high-flying bird. Below, the lava buried it all: the clinic, the university, and Shari’s house. The school, the tobacconist’s, even City Hall was gone (the Pride flag striking a jaunty note, flying high above the destruction). But even before that, Prudence Yu had smelled rotting egg in the air of her garden and she’d had a sense, a sinking feeling. She’d tried to tell her husband, Steve, but he (embroiled in a standing Thursday night Zoom battle with his sisters over their late mother’s estate) had brusquely shooed her away. She’d lifted Baby Grace out of her bassinet, exiting the house through the kitchen to the attached garage. She strapped Grace into her car seat, unplugged the cable from the wall, and drove away, as far as the charge would carry them. When Prudence heard, the following day, what the volcano had done, she was sorry but also felt…vindicated maybe? There’d been some longstanding but unspoken agreement, she thought, to ignore the mountain in favor of smaller, shiny things, things that were easier to comprehend. She would miss her husband, but what else, ultimately, could a mother have done? Was Grace to suffer and stay through something that had nothing to do with her? Steve’s sisters would feel bad about this, Prudence believed, and might finally cough up his full inheritance for the baby. Of course, the insurance company had canceled their homeowners policy years ago, but Steve did have full life. She was already making plans. With Grace, she could go away and start over again…someplace else where it was safe. Heather Pegas lives in Los Angeles, where she writes exceedingly compelling grant proposals for a living. Her essays and creative nonfiction are featured in journals such as Tahoma Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Longridge Review, Slag Glass City, and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. She has extreme climate anxiety.

To Jessica Schwartz, From Your Designated Demon: In 6,000 years of existence, I have never had anyone summon me over 200 times in a single month. My secretary, Joann, can barely handle the requests. Unfortunately, I can’t solve all of your problems. I can’t make Jared love you again. I can’t make you love yourself. I can, however, add Jared to the waitlist for Hell. Don’t expect to hear back quickly. Let's talk about what’s in the cauldron. Why raw hearts? Can’t they at least be medium rare? After 223 raw hearts, you really start to crave some McNuggets. Must you summon me at Interlaken Park? Yellow sac spiders are scary, and it rains 150 days a year in Seattle. The McDonald’s at 3rd and Pine has AC and fewer spiders. No virgins necessary. You can just summon me yourself. I don’t judge, and Bryan already works full-time at the McDonald’s. My services work best in combination with other self-care activities. Try journaling, therapy, eating a McFlurry. My therapist says I need to set firm boundaries. So, I can’t always come when you call. Please contact Joann to schedule in advance. I would appreciate you calling me by name, as I feel like we’ve reached that point in our relationship. It’s Xarthreldoug'grorenunarog, but you may call me Doug. Thank you for your patronage. I really do wish you the best. And yeah, fuck Jared. Katherine Schmidt’s poetry is published in Roi Fainéant Press, Icebreakers Lit, JAKE, Unbroken, and elsewhere. She is a co-founder and EIC of Spark to Flame Journal. Natalie Wolf (https://nwolfmeep.wixsite.com/nmwolf) is an editor for Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press and a former co-editor and co-founder of Spark to Flame Journal. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Popshot Quarterly, Right Hand Pointing, Pink Panther Magazine, I-70 Review, and more. Her piece "When I told my cat he couldn't go outside, he:," published in The Hooghly Review, was nominated for Best Microfiction 2024.

A continuous note Played on a violin Suddenly stops For a moment It even looked As if I wouldn’t bleed Then the marionette climbs back up The strings it dangles from To find no one is there On my palm, A scar run through the Heart line Trips and falls, discontinuous & I hear her voice Tell me the moon Is covered in windflowers––– In other words, The sky spread out its veins Ancient into the night, Ancient into the moon: These are the well-tamed Savages––– The wolves are in the other room. Ray Corvi’s work was published or is forthcoming in Brushfire, Chaffin Journal, DASH Literary Journal, Evening Street Review, FictionWeek Literary Review, FRiGG Magazine, Grub Street, Neologism Poetry Journal, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, The Penmen Review, Poetry Super Highway, The Round Magazine, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, The Seattle Star, Sublunary Review, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Triggerfish Critical Review, Whimperbang, and Whistling Shade. I write using the pen name Ray Corvi.

The black-and-white corridor smells of the memory of cigarettes, parables of ash caught above the coating of clorox. each step documents the gaps where the wind and the noise and the darkness seep through: light fixtures installed off-center, the spaces where the windows don’t quite fit. the staircase leans towards the center, some countless odyssey of rises and falls, forgetting marks of progress. this was once a possibility of a home—the dizzying polar curl of tiles, the twist of iron rails, a barely-covered dilapidation pretending at elegance. but what seeps through the cracks is a poison. the rot is crawling through the floor. I remember that time I first saw the madness of parallel mirrors, stopping suddenly in the hallway, staring at the endless iterations of myself curving into an infinity. the puzzle of everything that could have been, had one or two or two-thousand things gone differently. even to this day I am still standing there, watching the slight delay as some happier self steps out of the frame. Megan Busbice is a poet and fiction writer currently living in Chicago. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a Fulbright grant recipient, and currently works in public policy. Megan’s work has appeared in the literary magazines New Critique, Rogue Agent, Cellar Door, and Rainy Day. Her work is upcoming in Door Is A Jar.

Old man Clancy needed a good scare. When Teddy walked past his house to the school bus, Clancy spit in his hair. He called the cops when Teddy and the other kids played football in the road. He even kicked Muddy, Teddy’s dog. After helping his collie limp around the house for a month, he’d had enough. Teddy’s older brother, Jake, once showed him that filling a plastic bottle with certain pool cleaners, depositing tinfoil, and then sealing the concoction with a cap would cause the bottle to fizz and explode. He’d ask Jake to make the potion, but ever since Teddy started middle school, Jake wanted Teddy to learn the hard way. “Don’t be a pussy,” Jake said. He repeated to himself what his brother told him when he worried over when his mother would get home after her late shifts: “Man up, kid.” Teddy would man up. He decided to test the formula by himself in the woods. He set a loaded bottle next to a bush and dashed behind the safety of a nearby tree. For a few minutes, he thought that the experiment had failed, but when the explosion came, it felt like an earthquake. Clancy would feel this earthquake. The plan was simple: trigger the formula, set the bottle on his doorstep, ring the bell, and flee to cover. Clancy’s awakening would be golden. He lived in a large house three blocks down the road and was the head of the neighborhood watch, so Teddy had to be stealthy. He couldn’t wait to see Clancy piss his pants thinking that the bomb was real. He snuck up Clancy’s driveway and plopped the bottle down on his doorstep. After igniting it, he rang the bell and scrambled behind the bushes of a neighboring house. Clancy opened the door, his rumpled face reddening at once. Teddy beamed as Clancy hurled expletives into the summer air. Then the explosion came, and a chunk of the ravaged bottle careened into the yard just a few feet from the bush Teddy hid behind. Clancy teetered back and forth and then grabbed his throat—a shard of plastic protruded from it. He retched as black blood seeped from his neck. Falling to his hands and knees, he attempted to cry out for help, but all he could do was moan and wheeze. He dragged himself to the edge of the yard, leaving a crimson stream behind him, Teddy froze. Teddy’s Collie rushed around the corner and jumped onto Clancy, who tried to yell but could only spit blood. Muddy bit into Clancy’s arm, sensing his fear and aggression. A woman across the street screamed and ran over. She tried to pull Muddy off of him, but the dog’s bite was too strong. “Get help,” she said to Teddy. “He’s dying.” Teddy felt like he was dreaming. “Now,” she said, gritting her teeth at him. “Now. He’s dying.” But Teddy didn’t move. Teddy didn’t move for hours. Brett Pribble’s work has appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, decomP, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Saw Palm, The Molotov Cocktail, Five on the Fifth, Maudlin House, and other places. He is the editor-in-chief of Ghost Parachute. Follow him on Twitter @brettpribble.

An incomplete log of children who I have not seen: The Sasquatch. His body type is indistinguishable from that of my father. They share teardrop eyes and a sweet tooth for hyperbole. Observers note their gait. They give the impression of always stepping over something. They are described as lone wolves, which is not incorrect yet not fully understood. They would spare this world their weeping. They cannot understate the case, so they burn their poems. Their hair grows longer every time they glimpse the divine or grieve. My father after 1999. He has been changed. He was in Albuquerque, and I was in New York. Sparrows held security councils on his windowsill. He was dressed as an old man in buffalo plaid. He sounded like Johnny Cash and Billy Graham. He wrote me letters in colored pencil. I returned them. He let them write “cardiac event,” which is not incorrect but incomplete. He closed his eyes on the carpet and opened them in a horn section where he plays first trumpet. He is an assistant to the department of Setting the Lonely in Families. He has been changed. The Oldest Child. Eyes have seen Him. Observers note His spoor. I do not know if His hair is long. He was born while already present. He made walruses and all the good decisions. He is the Eye. I am visible. He does not travel without packing my teardrops in His bottle. He shakes them together with my father’s like a chemist. His backpack is enormous. I fall asleep on His shoulders and wake up wild to write. A “bad person.” His existence is the only tenet on which our species agrees. He is an article of faith. He is accepted without evidence. I do not believe in him, even though I have seen him. He has unhappy eyes. He has my fingers. He traffics in the terrible. He lies to his mother and steals loaves and virtue. He writes vicious letters to the Oldest Child and sprinkles them with anthrax. He breaks the world. It was already broken. He is more than his actions and less important than this morning’s bread. It was decided that he should be here. It was a good decision. He tries to hide behind his hair. He is not flammable, which disappoints his siblings. Myself. I am informed that I have been sighted. I have my father’s eyes, the color of a pond that has not rippled since summer. I have too many pencils and the ego to work them to the nubs. I cannot erase my tracks. My feet are large. Someone provides evidence that I was curled like a kitten in the backpack at the time of the crime. The case is dismissed. I let them write “innocent,” which is not correct but complete. Not even my bangs are singed. Angela Townsend (she/her) is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately. She lives just outside Philadelphia with two merry cats.

In barely a whisper he muttered the cat’s name. She sat, ignoring him, by the sliding glass doors in the dining room, where out in the yard two crows against a backdrop of new snow had her full attention. An imperious exhaustion suddenly came over him, and for the first time that he could remember he felt with absolute certainty that he would never make it to the bed. There was still a little bourbon in the glass. I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink. No no no. The cat did not move as she watched the crows. There there, he thought. There there. Ralph’s has been widely published over the years, appearing most recently in The High Window (UK) with poems forthcoming soon in Plume (USA) and Queen's Quarterly (Canada). His latest collection is A Passable Man (2021), about which Nina MacLaughlin in The Boston Globe wrote "These are physical poems, attuned to natural rhythms and those rhythms' effects on spirit and body both. ...Quiet wisdom, which is the best kind of wisdom, lives in his lines."

It’s nighttime, and I sit wondering if I might be serial killered out here in my own backyard. It’s unlikely, I know. So I remind myself, and then try to fashion out of this shield a bunker, or a boat, or just a bigger shield. I think I’m really sad and the strange night bird is whortling like a cartoon version of itself in this world that feels too real to be real. And yet, tomorrow is trash day.  Rent is due. I have to remember to defrost the chicken. Because I am still alarmingly alive, while more of this world will disappear tomorrow. My cat is at the window looking out, his paw holding down the blinds, which he knows is not allowed, and his face is so excruciatingly sweet, I laugh because no one is seeing this but me, and maybe the feral cat on the shed roof, and maybe the cartoon night bird. If I screamed right now, maybe they would join. And more and more would open their throats and scream and it would travel around the world. And maybe it’s already begun in some other throat, and it’s on its way to me now. I’m ready for that ecstatic choir of screams to lend my voice to. For seeing my parents alive until they’re old. For a love that feels safe. Feral animals welcoming me to their home. And justice. Or vengeance. Or maybe a god holding justice and vengeance behind their back, and saying “Pick a hand,” and I say, “Right! No, left!” And we laugh and laugh.

Maybe I’ll never die. Or maybe I will. Unknown pulses push through the space I’m also in. Thank you. Love is different than I expected. Or maybe this is something else, something as yet undiscovered and it is my job to describe it and make it real? Well, it’s nice and terrible and begins in the blood at the back of my throat. The leaves fall into the lake. My daughter sighs in her sleep and says, just now as I’m writing in this notebook, “I kinda don’t feel like saying it.” She burrows deeper into her sick daytime sleep, mouth just open, sweaty hair starfished on the borrowed pillow. The fan circulates the air coming in from the open, screenless window. Everyone else has gone on a hike to the falls. I went outside and pressed my ear to an oak tree. I heard nothing but my own skin scraping the bark. Another leaf falls, but the lake caught the sun and sent shards of its light into the room. I asked my daughter, “Did a bird fly in?” And she said, “No.” Then, “Well, maybe.” She sleeps now. My father has stage three non-small cell lung cancer. I called him and left a message. When you pass through that membrane we can’t perceive you clearly or maybe at all. Will it be lonely? For you or for us? We probably have a few months before we find out. It’s hard to perceive how the time after will feel to whoever I am then. Who I am now will be gone. My daughter’s mouth moves but this time she doesn’t say anything. I’m not sad, really, and I’m trying out gratitude rather than panic. She turns, stretches, wakes a little at the noises of the other children returning from the falls. One says, “I’ll just wait in the crazy room,” and the other yells, “I’ll meet you down there!” My daughter, fully awake now, looks at me. “I didn’t know everyone left,” she says. “I heard them. Or I thought I did.” “Were you dreaming?” I ask. She thinks about it. “I just saw a bird!” She points to the open window. “Or maybe it was just something falling from the trees.” Travis Nichols is the author of two novels on Coffee House Press, Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder and The More You Ignore Me, as well as two poetry collections, Iowa (Letter Machine Editions) and See Me Improving (Copper Canyon Press). With Katie Geha, he co-edited the anthology Poets on Painters from Wichita State University Press and was the tour manager for the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour. He currently lives in Georgia and works for the humanitarian relief organization CARE.org.

the irregularity of monotonousness   is now   absorbed. the obduracy   observed from white paper that was glued to its kind did not surrender to make a pretzel of a wasp. but I saw a swallow tail catching the air, persiflaging me. it knew how I missed it. the silence on the refectory grew into my lips like lava salvaging itself till it became obsidian. & with a chest of choices, I stand, looking at a fjord of my doctor’s prescriptions. It felt like winter when I felt the recesses outside my thighs: sideways, green. if a year was to pass without this stimulus, it would / should be parthenogenesis. the streetʼs greenness turns into chips for the conquest of the feet. from the generosity of deciduousness, the streetʼs greenness breaks with a sweet sound. consistently. the season could be an appendage to a hole of memories. it scars everybody with a part song; pectoral scarring — precarious. & when the season goes, it would be like cowering a human artery & letting the ownerʼs shadow mix with the still wind without disrupting any light. the earth is now an intolerable interstice, blurred. Israel Okonji (He / Him) is a Southern Nigerian artist of poetry, storytelling & music. He is published @ Brittle Paper, Bruiser Magazine, Midsummer Magazine, Wasteland review — & forthcoming ones @ Hiraeth zine, & Querencia Pressʼ anthology. He listens to music ranging from Nas, the Wu-Tang Clan to Chris Brown, Alicia Keys. He hopes to fulfill his dream of collecting records like Craig Kallman. He has a special place for Brit actress Emma Watson & American singer / dancer Normani in his heart. He tweets @izrltrcz.

As a child, Bella had watched them through the kitchen window, her mother dipping and spinning to Are You Lonesome Tonight, one round and one tall thin silhouette dancing beneath the striplight, impossible to see who was holding who. “I call him Nechtan,” her mother had said.  “It means clean and pure.” She popped Nechtan and his bucket into the cupboard under the stairs. “Don’t tell your father.” And she winked at Bella. Forty years later Bella fell in love with a hoover called Henry whom she renamed Hal. Her mother would have liked Hal, so light on his feet and much more hygienic than Nechtan, who had succumbed to mould despite his name. And of course much more flexible. Some of Bella’s favourite moments came to be the two of them gliding around the house, Hal’s hum making her fingers tingle. Bella would try to put into words what he meant to her. “I’m not into sex any more, as you know. But you’re the best partner I’ve ever had. You’re there when I need you, you don’t leave crumbs in your wake, and you don’t leave toenail clippings that catch in my socks.” She shuddered at the memory. “You don’t ask me where I’m going, or when I’ll be back, or explain about routes, or ask me why I don’t understand.” Bella fell quiet, and Hal slid to a stop, after which Bella turned him off. It could have been a marriage made in heaven – if Bella had believed in marriage, or heaven. But after fifteen years of the perfect partnership, Hal developed a cough. Bella spoke to him softly, and gave him extra rests, ignoring the trail of breadcrumbs Hal left behind him, but when he started to smell of smoke, she had to switch him off and weep a little weep. The repair shop was the brainchild of Martha, who knitted postbox toppers. The event offered seamstresses, carpenters, guitar tuners, and an electrician. Bella took her place in the queue and stared around the hall at the hundreds of other ex-lovers, each in their own private state of distress, waiting for someone to fix them. She ate biscuits with a barista cradling a teamaker and an acupuncturist clutching a candelabra; she traded stories with a drying paint tester who’d come with a lawnmower, and a ghostwriter in a onesie with a broken zip. How easy it is to fall in love, she thought. The electrician unclipped Hal’s belly and probed his innards gently with a screwdriver. She was gentle, but firm. “I’m afraid he’s done for. This happens, you think they’re forever, but they aren’t.” She leaned back and looked into Bella’s eyes. “Sandra,” she said. “I fix things. Just not this one. I’m so sorry.” Bella left alone. So many Henry’s in the room, so many fractured relationships. She thought about loss, forgiveness, and renewal. Tomorrow she’d buy a new hoover, maybe a Henrietta. She fingered the business card in her pocket; and call Sandra. Sarah Masters lives in York and teaches English for Speakers of Other Languages. Her tiny stories have appeared in Full House Literary, The Hooghly Review, CafeLit, Flashflood, and Shooter Flash. She finds hoovers tricky to love.  @serreyjma

I leapt out my bedroom window onto my Nimbus 2000. A couple putting up pictures of their son. The bobbing of a go-getter on her daily run. On the 11th floor a shirtless man stared out the window, contemplating football and failure. We exchanged hellos. I flew to my lover’s home. He was sucking his thumb, falling softly asleep. I flew to my sister’s flat. She was crying. I couldn’t comfort her. I flew to my parents’ flat. It was filled with hornets and bees. Filled every square centimeter of their tiny house. Deep from its heart came a pong that brought tears to my eyes. I’m sorry, I prayed; for what, I wasn’t sure. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent my last paycheck on a Nimbus 2000. Now my broomstick beeps at me – flashing bright white and blue. There’s work to be done. There’s work to be done. There is work to do.